The earliest hint of the K-shift:
There’s a group of artists who most of the general public has yet to know exist. These are highly skilled painters, sculptors, and draftsmen trained in ateliers or academies who are not embarrassed to utter the word “beautiful” at a time when that word is generally scorned by the contemporary art establishment. You’ll hardly ever see their works in major museums or at major galleries for longer than a short stint. Most of their works are whisked away by private collectors or are sitting in their studios, waiting to be discovered.
These artists value quality over quantity, sincerity over cynicism, intrinsic value over marketing hype, and the Western tradition of fine art over the avant garde fixation on newness. In an ironic twist of history, these traditional artists are perhaps the most radical and marginalized group of artists living today. And yet their numbers are growing.
Mostly awkward or humble when they try to describe their own work, they don’t fit into any radical stereotype. Suspicious of labels, they don’t know what to call themselves because they are too immersed in creating visual art to be able to think about words. They have decided to continue the Western tradition of art that has a reverence for mastery and skill and to learn the fundamentals of a visual language that developed over 700 years.
What is funny is in nature K-selection is about producing greatness. For some reason that has imbued the psychology with a fundamental drive to create goodness. Even where intellect merges with the underlying urges, the product of it always seems to be good, be it morals, civilizations, or even art.
Leftism, as its polar opposite, would appear to be imbued with the exact opposite motive force. Whatever it does, whatever it produces, is always somehow bad. Its morals are degraded, its civilizations are in decline and collapsing, its logic is abhorrent, and its art is crass and at times even disgusting.
It is funny how the world divides so cleanly into what is obviously good and bad.
Tell others about r/K Theory, because we want to spread the good
[…] Beauty Makes A Comeback In Art […]
FYI-
The movement itself is called Neorealism at the moment (Neoclassicism is taken for architecture), in Europe it’s been a longstanding quiet continuation of academies, especially in places like non-pozzed Russia. In America, these guys are not the founders as far as I know, they’re capitalists – it’s the Art Renewal Centre, they have shows and competitions! Become a patron if you love art. Modern art is only profitable to politicians as social power and the economy as an industry, paid for by billionaires who expect never to sell (no collapse), it’s purely for tax-exemption purposes and inheritance, most know it has no genuine value, they’re the new tulip bulb craze. It’s also a factor in sexual degeneracy, so colleges took it up for Cultural Marxism, contaminating all arts. Freud’s libidinal energy, source of lust and creativity, is the opposite of destructiveness and degeneracy.
As I explain it to my kids, if you could make photo-realistic paintings in 1500, you’d be a world-famous artist like Giotto or Da Vinci. With the same ability in 1900, you could earn a respectable middle-class income painting portraits of rich people, but you wouldn’t find fame on such a well-trod path.
Pablo Picasso wanted to be famous. So he hit on the idea of painting disgusting, degenerate, unrealistic art instead. Unchained from the constraints of realism, each artist can now do something completely different and unique, and be famous for it. This elevates individuals at the expense of the whole, as the layperson now defines “modern art” as “hideous garbage –my five-year-old draws better than that!”
Dont really agree with your disparagement of Picasso. Picasso was classically trained and could paint photorealistic pieces with the best of them. He took that training and went in a different direction with it to create powerful messages. I think the difference comes down to weather or not the artist is actually capable of painting classically. If a total noob just mirrored picasso, I would indeed consider that degenerate. But if you choose to go in bold new directions like salvador dali, or mc escher, with a foundation of classical training underneath you… That, my good sir, is indeed art.
I look forward to beautiful architecture that leaves no cubic centimeter of urbanity untouched. I look forward to the proper return of Classical architecture.
One cannot separate K-selection from great beauty. As the great civilizations of old invariably produces
This is my favourite website. I come here to get the elixir of truth and beauty every day. It just feels so good to read your essays. We have been poisoned by the r people for so long. Thank you for what you do. Keep it up. I will keep sending links to my friends.
Thank you for the encouragement.
Hi Leslie, Please feel free to join other likeminded people on the r/K Selection Theory Discussion Page on FB if you haven´t already done so.
Here´s the link – https://www.facebook.com/groups/187782054968995/
A television commentator, Andy Rooney, summed up Picasso’s talent and his own personal distaste for the pretense of modern art illustrating the master’s pre and post modern work commenting, “Before Picasso did this; he did this.”